Por parleir de ma povretei.
Yet this man was not without his pleasures. One of them, I remember, came from his interest in the study of architecture. For Askelon was a finely built city; and he used to walk much in the streets of it, gazing upon the fronts of the costly houses, all patterned, as I understood, after the purest Greek orders. He used to walk around admiring, and making me admire. But this man had a wonderful eye, a visual gift which must have been, I think, much the same thing as the second sight or clairvoyance of which we read; for upon the fronts of these fine houses he saw more than what the delicate taste, the cunning hand of the builder had placed there. I have heard him say that he was "a Sunday's child," referring to some superstition not current in that community—and he certainly made out writing upon those walls and doors which I, for one, could never see, though I have no doubt that it was really there. But they were legends which would have startled the residents could they have been audibly published in the streets of Askelon. "What inscriptions upon these door plates!" he would sometimes remark, walking down the Pentodon, the most fashionable street in the place: "Let me read you a few that I discern in this neighborhood"; and as we passed slowly before the Greek houses he pronounced, one by one, these remarkable words, reading them off, as it seemed, from the lintels of the very finest edifices. I cannot give all of them, but these, if I remember, were some: Charlatan, Tartufe, Peculator, Sharper, Parthis mendacior; and when we came to one of the corner houses, or "palaces," as they called them in Askelon, he said: "One of our furtive men lives there—one of our men of three letters. We have as many of them here in Askelon as ever existed in Plautus's time, and they are quite as able now as they then were to live in fine houses to which they have not quite the most honest claim in the world." While he spoke the man of three letters came out and ran down the marble staircase, smiling, and offering, I thought, to salute my friend as he stepped into his chariot; but my friend, though he had clear sight for the palace, did not see the owner.
But you were surely too severe, poor friend of mine. There were just men even in Askelon—upright, religious, and intelligent, full of good works. What if this clever conveyancer had appropriated to himself enough to buy him a fine house? Was it not in the very air of Askelon that he should do such a thing—that he, like others, should at any rate establish himself comfortably? and will not some honester man than himself live after him in the fine house? Come now, confess, I used to say, that you yourself, in his place, might not have done much better: confess, at least, that when you were a boy you put your fingers into the sugar-bowl when you should have kept them out, when you well knew that you ought to keep them out! And then my friend would confess the pressure of the "environment," the power of the "Zeit-Geist," as we have learned to call it since then. Poor man! That was long ago; and things have changed greatly in Askelon of latter years. They tell me that everybody there has now grown honest, and that nobody goes around any more reading invisible writing on the houses. And all the fine buildings are still standing, it appears; though the journals of that city remark that some of the Grecian architecture has peeled off from the fronts of the houses in the Pentodon, having been insecurely fastened on, it seems, at first. And how my poor friend used to criticise those very palaces in his dry, technical way! One thing in particular that he said I remember by the antithesis, the turn of it; he used to say that the architects of Askelon were never certain whether to construct ornament or to ornament construction.
Well, he is gone now; he will never blame Askelon again, or run down Gath. He died in Philistia. Perhaps he served his purpose there, but I am sure he would have done more if he had been a little less Quixotic in his notions.
But let us not grow tristful again. How many a happy escape, as we said, has been made from Philistia; how many a clear spirit has made its way out of the darkness to a true honor. If many who have had the higher endowments have perished in the shadow, princes dying behind the iron mask, yet not all have failed; some have broken away to a career. Of two such in particular let us conclude by speaking—Winckelmann and Heine. Both were Prussians, and each one migrated from the north into a southern country, a fugitive from "the power of the night, the press of the storm." Each waited long before his opportunity came; each learned that the "tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours." But each found his opportunity; and by what an instinctive escape! For Winckelmann it was his first journey out of Prussia, when, in 1755, he set his face toward Rome; still it was a homing flight like that of a carrier pigeon; for in Rome he found his appointed place, and there he spent in congenial work the remaining years of his life. Yet he could say, in the bitterness of his spirit, on reaching Rome, "I have come into the world and into Italy too late." Nor may we contradict that bitter cry, even in view of Winckelmann's great critical achievement; we have to ask, Might it not have been greater still, had he not been thus serus studiorum, as Horace phrases it—thus unluckily belated in his culture?
All the traits of these migrations of men of genius are interesting, and we may dwell for a moment, though at the risk of some digression, upon Winckelmann's disappointment on his arrival in the city of his desire. It was a pathetic disappointment, but one of a kind not infrequent with sensitive minds. Long detained by poverty in the north, it was not until the age of thirty-eight that he reached Italy; and when at last he arrived in Rome, the longed-for city wore a strange look for him—had an aspect for which he was not prepared. It was there that his emotion broke out as we have seen. We can understand his disappointment if we bear in mind the cruel treatment to which our fancies are commonly subjected at the hands of the fact. How swiftly, how silently, like the irrevocable sequence of images in a dissolving view, our premonitions vanish under the light of the reality! The actual Rome, the living man, the painting, the landscape which we travel far to see—these dispel at once the preconception; a glance, and the dream is gone, however long domesticated in the mind, however brightly glowing but now in the imagination. Fact is a careless bedfellow, and overlays the tender child Fancy; and even when nature contrives the change less rudely, we can hardly resign our poor, familiar fancies without regret. But sometimes, happily, we can do what Winckelmann did not do; we can retain the old fancies and compare them with the experience. Let me give a personal instance: I remember framing the distinctest image of the lakes of Killarney from my childhood readings in Peter Parley's veritable histories. There was the cool spring, shaded with bushes, and pouring out abundant waters; and there was the blessed Saint Patrick, standing by the rocky edge of the spring, clasping down the stout lid of an iron-bound chest upon the last of the unhappy serpents of Erin, and saying, "Be aisy, darlints!" just before casting the box into the depths of the lake. It was a pleasant scene, a clear imaginative microcosm; never was a distincter picture in my mind than that of this fancied Killarney. The real Killarney I saw many years after reading those histories of Peter Parley, yet that first vivid picture did not vanish at the sight; the fancied lake held its place against the reality; nay, even at this day, I can call up the two pictures at will, the imagined and the real, and compare the two—the scene of my early fancies with the humorous Celtic saint standing beside the spring and snapping down the lid of his box upon the tail of the last snake, on the one hand, and the broader landscape of reality, in which there were no saints, but many Patricks.
But Winckelmann, if he did not find the visionary Rome, soon became reconciled to the real one. The city put on the homelike look for him, and it was not long before it became profoundly endeared to him. It was with the authentic pang of homesickness that he left it, finally, to make that northward journey from which he was never to return.
How different was Heine's first experience of his newly-found home, Paris! For that other migrating spirit there was no such initiatory disappointment. For Heine his adopted city was from the first a spiritual home, a true city of refuge, an island of the blessed. For years, lingering in his cold city of the north, verdammtes Hamburg, as he called it, he had longed in vain to escape; and to what vivid expressions of his suffering he gives utterance! In one place he compares himself to the white swans at the public garden, whose wings were broken on the approach of winter that they should not fly away to the south:
"The waiter at the Pavilion declared that they were comfortable there, and that the cold was healthy for them. But that is not true. It is not good for one to be imprisoned hopelessly in a cold pool, and there to be frozen up; to have one's wings broken so that one can no longer fly forth to the fair South, where the beautiful flowers are, and the golden sunlight, and the blue mountain lakes. Alas! to me once was Fate not much kinder."
While still pent up in Hamburg he had written thus to a friend: "I am no German, as you well know.... There are but three civilized people—the French, the Chinese, and the Persian.... Ah, how I yearn for Ispahan! Alas! I, poor fellow, am far from its lovely minarets and odoriferous gardens! Ah, it is a terrible fate for a Persian poet that he must wear himself out in your base, rugged German tongue.... O Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! how miserable is your brother!"